Imaging Cancer Metabolism using Magnetic Resonance
Molecular imaging is likely to play an increasingly important role in predicting and detecting tumour responses to treatment and thus in guiding treatment in individual patients. We have been using MRI-based metabolic imaging techniques to detect tumour treatment response, to monitor disease progression and to identify tumour metabolic subtypes that display distinct therapeutic vulnerabilities. Initially this was using hyperpolarized 13C-labelled substrates. Nuclear spin hyperpolarization increases sensitivity in the 13C magnetic resonance experiment by >10,000x, which allows imaging of injected hyperpolarized 13C labelled cell substrates in vivo and, more importantly, the kinetics of their metabolic conversion into other cell metabolites. More recently we have been using 2H-labelled substrates; the relatively low sensitivity of detection is compensated by the very short T1s displayed by this quadrupolar nucleus, which enables extensive signal averaging in the absence of signal saturation.
This Focus Group, consisting of Hans Fischer Senior Fellow Prof. Kevin Brindle (Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute) and hosts Prof. Franz Schilling (Biomedical Magnetic Resonance, TUM) and Prof. Wolfgang Weber (Nuclear Medicine, TUM), will focus on imaging tumour one carbon metabolism using 2H-labelled serine, with a view to translating this into a clinical study back in Cambridge.